The caller wasn’t a fan.
At some point during an interview on a cable news program, I dropped a hint that I perhaps thought a person who aspired to a major party presidential nomination should know more about government policy than Donald Trump.
“Do you ever wonder in your quiet moments why newspapers are falling like dominoes to bankruptcy and lack of interest?” he asked. “Back to the campaign…” When he grew up, he said he was told that anyone could be president, there was no policy knowledge prerequisite.
Matt Lewis, one of the Beltway’s most honest and decent men, speaks to this phenomenon in his new book Too Dumb to Fail, a perfect fit for when Trump is the winner in seven out of 11 Super Tuesday states. The other Republican presidential candidates have now won as many states as Hillary Clinton’s Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders — combined.
Lewis’ main argument is that conservative intellectual standards have collapsed, making it easier for hucksters and, yes, con artists to win the right’s support. A lot of that has been fueled by the conservative-entertainment complex, relatively low-brow elements in talk radio and elsewhere that seek to titillate the right’s rank and file without edifying them.
He’s absolutely right. If it weren’t for a conservative desire to stoke anger and encourage people to respond to it in the same way they react to team sports, it would be hard to imagine so many people flocking to Trump regardless of his actual substantive public policy positions.
Too often, conservatism has become defined by “let’s root, root, root for the red team, if they don’t win it’s a shame.”
But conservatism has been losing this old ballgame for a long time if the scoreboard is measured by family, abortion, growth of government and a whole host of conservative priorities.
And whether or not Trump is right about how Republicans should govern, it’s true that conservatives haven’t been winning elections at the national level, winning policy battles against President Obama, winning at the border or winning the wars they’ve started in the Middle East lately.
Trump is merely the most extreme manifestation of conservative elite failure in the Republican presidential primaries. George H.W Bush, Bob Dole and Pat Robertson were the favorites in 1988 over Jack Kemp. It was Dole and Pat Buchanan over Phil Gramm in 1996, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee in 2008.
In each one of these elections, the mainstream conservative movement’s favorite candidates were the least favorite with the voters. The exception that proved the rule was 2000, when George W. Bush cultivated significant movement support in the late 1990s and managed to beat Steve Forbes in Iowa.
“Let me tell you something,” then-President Bush later told speechwriter Matt Latimer ahead of a CPAC speech, referring to the conservative movement. “I whupped Gary Bauer’s ass in 2000. So take out all this movement stuff. There is no movement.”
As economically illiterate as so many Trump supporters are, the truth is that conservative elites often provide answers to the same questions that are self-evidently wrong or correct but oversimplified or right but irrelevant to the experiences of the people they are talking to.
Do conservative elites speak for anyone they claim to speak for?
On free trade (which I support) and open immigration (which I don’t support), there have been far more losers than conservative and libertarian economic theory predicted. It is not as easy for people to shift into new field as free-market types suppose. The resulting erosion of communities isn’t easily resolved by telling people to drive Ubers.
These are a few small reasons conservative elites have no credibility with the voters inclined toward Trump. More importantly, it is why a charlatan like Trump has more influence than so many movement types.
That’s why even though I agree with all the anti-Trump manifestos, written by conservatives who are my colleagues and even my closest friends, I can’t help but be reminded of the story of the boy who told his rabbi he didn’t believe in God anymore.
The rabbi responded, “You think God cares what you think?”
The Trump supporters are far from God, but #NeverTrump has a similar feel of impotent futility.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Significant pockets of resistance to Trump, especially among conservatives, remain. We saw this on Super Tuesday. And even if there is no hope, writers like Lewis have a moral obligation to speak truth to power.
My friend is undoubtedly right that conservatives have been too eager to play dumb, even to the benefit of those are less dumb than evil. But the recent record suggests members of the conservative smart set, myself included, just aren’t as smart as we think we are.
